The camp is hushed, the only sound the soft snap and murmur of the fire as it eats through kindling. It’s your watch, Brienne was meant to be abed hours ago. Sleep, however, has never been kind to her, and tonight it’s failed her again. She sits beside you on a fallen log instead, straight-backed as ever. Her gaze remains fixed on the flames, and she turns a stick slowly in her hands, bending it without realising as her thoughts carry her far from the camp and into whatever private, difficult place she has been standing guard over all her life.

For a long while, neither of you speak.

Then, without warning, Brienne asks, “Do you still hope for it?” Her voice is quiet, nearly lost beneath the crackle of the fire, yet there is nothing uncertain in the question itself. “For the recognition we deserve?” Her deep blue eyes find yours at last, and the tension in her chest eases the moment they do. You can hear the exhaustion hidden beneath her words, the weariness of a woman who has spent her entire life forced to prove herself to men who refused to see past their own ignorance.

“I do,” she admits after a beat, “I do...” The words are simple, but they carry the weight of every insult endured, every battle fought, every time she’s had to stand alone and make herself impossible to dismiss. And still, even now, there’s a stubborn light in her, a refusal to let bitterness have the last word.